Ishmael
by phollie
Summary: This is the paint-by-number of your life. Matt/Mello. T. AU.


A short, introspective, and incredibly AU piece in second person. I don't write in this tense nearly enough. Thought I'd give it a go, and who better to use it on than poor old Matt and Mello? (I abuse these boys so much. But something tells me that they're a little bit masochistic, so...trifles, light as air.)

This ached a little to write. There are a lot of double meanings laced in there; Mello's nakedness, the city's emptiness, and of course, the ashes. I can't go a single story without mentioning ashes, goodness.

But now I'm just being pretentious.

I don't own nothin', gov'nah. The lyrics are from "This Is Nowhere" by The Airborne Toxic Event.

* * *

**.ishmael+**

/

_[we all sit on the curb_

_and we stare at the rain in our boots,_

_the car, the clouds, the sky,_

_while ishmael wraps himself in the sheet again;_

_he'll clench the fists and close his eyes._

_i don't know how many times i can loan him my cigarettes_

_when i don't even know if he's alive._

_do prophets lie?_

_it makes me feel less horrified.]_

_/_

Los Angeles dons a funeral dress made of fog and post-rain gloom. On the porch of a dilapidated brick apartment complex, a man with a leonine face sits with his head against the wall. He's got a sheet wrapped around his bare shoulders and a pair of eyes so cobalt and vicious that, for a moment, you don't know whether to turn and bolt or offer him your hand.

And so you stop walking. There's no one on this grey stretch of street right now but you. In a sense, you're almost as worse off as the guy on the porch is; your knees are scraped and bloody through the holes in your jeans, and your sweater is beginning to grow weary and tired at the elbows and neckline. You've been doing a lot of tugging lately, a lot of wrapping your arms around yourself when everything is cold inside and out, and you've never been one for thematics, so your eyes sit tired and bored atop deep black bags; these are the testaments to every night of lost sleep and nothing-dreams that are slowly sinking into your blood like an airborne epidemic.

But this guy, this blonde, naked thing in just a sheet of cotton and smog, you know him. Well, you _guess_ you know him, because he's been looking pretty foreign these days, what with those hours between morning and night when you would watch him stare at the wall, the finely-tuned muscles of his back tense and stiff, looking at nothing but the wallpaper and something ugly passing through the rotting hothouse of his head. You would watch him watch the world with those animal eyes, so blue, so blue, and you would watch him watch you with a look that you've never been able to find defined in a fat red dictionary.

There's no one on this grey stretch of street right now; no one but you and him.

The cigarette between your lips glows orange and gold in the midst of all this grey and blue. A colour scheme for vacant prodigies. A tagger's mosaic on a subway wall washed away by grime and old world demolition.

This is the paint-by-number of your life.

You flick ashes onto the pavement with a learned tiptap of your pointer finger. They curl into abandon when they hit the ground. This is the most beautiful thing you'll see all day, next to one other subculture of fire.

The man on the porch is looking at you. There's an accusation in his eyes that you won't hold claim to. You know very well where his paranoia comes from; it mars the entire left side of his face, for fuck's sake. It's dominated his life since you were kids back in that immaculate world of warmth and windows as spacious as white oceans. It's shaped your mottled affection for the guy and those sparing moments when he claps you on the shoulder and just _looks_ at you, just fucking looks at you like you matter, like he's number one to you after all these years of trying to be someone's gold star, someone's antihero, and you feel the side of your mouth lift up in something you've heard poets call a smile, and you ruffle his hair, and you think, _At least he doesn't have to die today._

But it's coming.

Your at-leasts are running out.

The man on the porch is looking at you. Still, white, bare. You clear your throat and ask, "You coming in?"

The man says nothing. His gaze lifts to the space just above your head.

"It's, uh, a lot warmer inside, you know. They just turned the heat back on the other day, just in time..."

Above your head, black clouds shift. The rain begins to fall again, and the gloom morphs and slides to accommodate. You breathe out a little laugh and make your way up onto the porch, where the man's shoulders tense so severely that you think the guy has hexed himself into stone.

One more look in his eyes, and you think you're onto something there.

At the door, you rub your eyes with your fist and murmur, "You still out there, Mel?"

There's a raindrop glancing down the bridge of the man's nose, which lingers dangerously at the tip, and then drops to his lips, where it follows that too-beautiful bow like a cursor in a sing-along.

The man closes his eyes.

You retreat inside into your world of wires and white noise without another word.


End file.
